On 2013-10-09 08:00, Sönke Ludwig wrote:
There have been ideas in that direction in #52 and #34 and also in some earlier discussions (need to search for those). However, there have been strong objections from package maintainers regarding the feasibility or hygiene of this approach in general.
I agree it's a very ambitious side project. However maybe there is some middle ground solution where at least a customized error message can be output in case of a missing library. In our case, external libraries of this kind ideally should only occur for Deimos(-like) modules, so it's not unrealistic that there will be good broad support for this solution, even if it requires manual work.
I'm wondering how difficulty it would be to support external
dependencies. Something like:
{
"external" : {
"curl": "1.2.3"
}
}
The tool would then just run "apt-get install curl", "port install curl"
or whatever the native package manager is for the given platform.
The problems I see with this is that Windows doesn't really have a
package manager. Mac OS X doesn't have one installed by default but I
think it's ok rely on Homebrew and MacPorts.
The other problem is package names. Different package manager might use
slightly different names for the same packages. Also MacPorts support
variants where other package managers might require a separate package.
/Jacob Carlborg